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A model that can predict outbreak of diseases developed on HWN INSIGHTS

Thousands of lives could be saved in the developing world every year after scientists came up with a system to forecast the outbreak of diseases such as dengue fever and Ebola from telephone calls.

Researchers from New York University have based their disease-predicting technique on telephone calls to a public-health hotline.

They claim it can forecast an outbreak of dengue fever, a mosquito-borned virus that infects up to 400,000 people a year, two to three weeks ahead of time with a high degree of precision.

And they say the system could also be applied to diseases such as Zika and Ebola.

Early detection:

Thousands of lives are lost every year in developing countries for failing to detect epidemics early because of the lack of real-time data on reported cases,” said Professor Lakshminarayanan Subramanian.

We think our technique can be of use to public-health officials in their fight against the spread of crippling diseases,” he added.

The system, described in the journal Science Advances, measures the number of calls received at a health hotline facility to forecast the number of dengue cases at a block-by-block level.

We think our technique can be of use to public-health officials in their fight against the spread of crippling diseases.

Once a hotspot has been identified, healthcare workers can move to clamp down on its spread, primarily by eliminating the carriers of a particular disease, such as mosquitoes – a practice known as vector control.

Collecting disease surveillance data usually requires a huge effort, as disease incidence data is collected and analysed from healthcare facilities all over a country. By contrast, this system is able to closely monitor a disease by using the calls as a barometer, the researchers say.

Early warning systems in the past only generate alerts of disease outbreaks on a city or state level. And they are often of little significance given that government’s don’t have enough resources to allocate to large geograpical units,” said Nabeel Abdur Rehman, who also worked on the research.

We have developed a system that can pinpoint the location inside a city where disease activity has increased so the government could perform targeted containment of a disease, he added.

The team’s efforts to develop the system started in the aftermath of the 2011 dengue fever outbreak in Pakistan, which infected more than 21,000 people and caused 350 deaths. They used about 300,000 calls to the health hotline, set up in the aftermath of the 2011 outbreaks, to forecast the number of dengue cases across the city and at a block-by-block level over a two-year period.

The researchers then matched their predictions with the number of cases reported in public hospitals. The results showed the model was able to accurately flag the outbreak, as well as the number of patients and their locations two or three weeks ahead of time.

Source: Inews, HWN Africa.

: 2016-07-10 08:06:11 | : 1411